I just noticed today that Signal (not talking Molly) is now available on F-Droid via the “Guardian” repository.
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up.
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Molly-FOSS is awesome and it now has UnifiedPush support built-in!
Get it with Obtainium
Woah that’s awesome to hear about the FOSS variant. I’ll switch over to that version now
Just make sure to set up UnifiedPush if you want to receive notifications while your Molly database is locked. I recommend the new Sunup UP distributor. I wanted to make a post about it in !unifiedpush@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but never got around to do it.
For Mollysocket, there are a few public instances. molly.adminforge.de is one of them. You can also set up your own on Fly.io, check out this repo: https://github.com/pcrockett/mollysocket-fly
Or you can obviously self-host it on any VPS or hardware that you ownI have my own mollysocket and ntfy, both on tailscale domains with funnel. You can restrict your mollysocket to only your ID.
What makes Sunup different from ntfy? Is it better?
Or via Accrescent
Thanks. You can get it by Obtainium too.
I was gonna say, I got Molly-FOSS from F-droid, but I actually had to go back and check. It checks out though. I did also get obtainium so I can keep a better eye on updates and actually check the changes on git before updating something as important as secure, encrypted coms. Also I figured I should really start checking the signature each update from now on.
Please forgive if this is a stupid question, but what is the difference between the play store version and this? Assuming it is not altered by a bad actor.
I would hope the difference is that the f-droid version does not contain any proprietary code.
No, it’s not a special “FOSS” version, it’s just the official binary distributed through the Guardian Project repo (as I have proven: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/16230276). If you want a FOSS variant, check out Signal-FOSS or Molly, they also offer a FOSS variant. You can either download it from their custom F-Droid repo, pull the APK from GitHub using Obtainium or get it from Accrescent.
Yikes. Thanks for the info.
Is there anything specifically wrong with molly. It seems more locked down by default and is fully open source. Seems better to me.
No, nothing wrong with it. I use it actually. People are used to Molly being on F-Droid so I didn’t want anyone to think that I was referencing that instead of actual Signal.
They do not ship updates as fast as official Signal client does. Do not use it unless you specifically need one of its security features
Iirc Molly in F-droid still using FCM and the google maps API. If you want Molly-Foss, you have to use Obtanium to pull APKs from their git releases.
Edit: I was wrong, you can get it off their F-Droid repository.
No. You can use their f-droid repo to get molly-foss
It’s weird that this isn’t mentioned on the signal website or blog? They also distribute the binary with a signature you can check there if you want a non-play store source that’s actually verifiable.
It’s probably not an official thing. F-Droid can’t distribute apps in the official repo via their own policy if the developer doesn’t agree. Third-party repos like Guardian can.
If it’s not official, how do you verify who is building the binary?
I think they ship prebuilt binaries, i.e. the exact same ones you find on the Signal website
AFAIK this also applies to Tor Browser, Orbot and other third-party apps distributed by Guardian
Edit: I downloaded the files and manually verified the signatures. They are indeed the exact same files.
Because I didn’t really know how to grab an APK from the Guardian F-Droid repo, I used their S3 bucket and downloaded the Signal APK. It’s named
Signal-Android-website-prod-universal-release-7.30.2.apk, which is the exact same file name as the one of the APK you can get from the Signal website.I then used
keytoolto print the signature certificate fingerprint: (renamed the files to make it less confusing)keytool -printcert -jarfile signal-website.apkSigner #1: Certificate #1: Owner: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US Issuer: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US Serial number: 4bfbebba Valid from: Tue May 25 17:24:42 CEST 2010 until: Tue May 16 17:24:42 CEST 2045 Certificate fingerprints: SHA1: 45:98:9D:C9:AD:87:28:C2:AA:9A:82:FA:55:50:3E:34:A8:87:93:74 SHA256: 29:F3:4E:5F:27:F2:11:B4:24:BC:5B:F9:D6:71:62:C0:EA:FB:A2:DA:35:AF:35:C1:64:16:FC:44:62:76:BA:26 Signature algorithm name: SHA1withRSA (weak) Subject Public Key Algorithm: 1024-bit RSA key (weak) Version: 3keytool -printcert -jarfile signal-guardian.apkSigner #1: Certificate #1: Owner: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US Issuer: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US Serial number: 4bfbebba Valid from: Tue May 25 17:24:42 CEST 2010 until: Tue May 16 17:24:42 CEST 2045 Certificate fingerprints: SHA1: 45:98:9D:C9:AD:87:28:C2:AA:9A:82:FA:55:50:3E:34:A8:87:93:74 SHA256: 29:F3:4E:5F:27:F2:11:B4:24:BC:5B:F9:D6:71:62:C0:EA:FB:A2:DA:35:AF:35:C1:64:16:FC:44:62:76:BA:26 Signature algorithm name: SHA1withRSA (weak) Subject Public Key Algorithm: 1024-bit RSA key (weak) Version: 3The fingerprints are identical.
Another edit: I just noticed that Signal even has official instructions for checking the signature on their APK download page. They use
apksignerinstead ofkeytool, but it’s basically the same process.Thanks for doing this!
Takes like 2 minutes 😅
You have quite a bit of background knowledge to know how to do that though, you should give yourself more credit!
Thanks, I mean I used to work as a Java developer before, and I’m quite interested in the Android platform, so I’m familiar with the SDK and build tools, and know how app signatures work
But it’s really not that hard to figure out. There are countless guides on the internet, and as I said, Signal even has a quick guide for how to verify the APK signature on the download page
I have a tangential question. Would it not make sense for an OS, in this case Android, to have some proper mechanism for installing apps (in this case APKs) directly from a website (as lots of people have been doing fastidiously from signal.org by necessity)?
After all, this is all about trust. With software, assuming that you trust the developer, the goal is to be sure that nobody interfered with the developer’s compiled software - and who better to guarantee that than the developer themself, at their own domain? DNS resolution is already based on the “web of trust” principle, which is why you can trust your bank’s website. Arguably F-Droid performs a valuable role as a curator and selector of good software, but is there any good technical need for it to actually distribute the software?
